Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel

What does Uber Eats actually cost restaurants?

Uber Eats takes a commission on every order. The rate depends on your market, your agreement and your order volume, and it usually lands between 15% and 30% of the order value. In the UK and Ireland, most restaurants on standard agreements pay around 25-30%.

Say you sell £10,000 a month through Uber Eats. At those rates, £2,500 to £3,000 goes to the platform before you've paid for food, staff, packaging or rent. Over a year that's £30,000 to £36,000 on a single channel. Even at the low end of 15%, the same sales cost you £1,500 a month, or £18,000 a year.

That doesn't make Uber Eats useless. It puts your menu in front of people who would never have found you otherwise. The trouble starts when it's your only delivery channel. The sensible move is to build a direct ordering channel next to your marketplace listing and shift orders across gradually, so you don't lose the sales you already have.

Why restaurants need a direct ordering channel

Commission comes straight out of your margin

Most restaurants run a gross margin of 60-70% on food before labour and overheads. A 25-30% commission takes a big bite out of that before you've covered anything else.

Here's a £12 pizza ordered through a marketplace:

Customer pays £12
Marketplace takes £3 (25%)
You receive £9
Food cost is about £3.60 (30%)
Left over before labour and overheads: £5.40

And the same pizza ordered through your own website or app:

Customer pays £12
Payment processing is about £0.24 (2%)
You receive £11.76
Food cost is still £3.60
Left over before labour and overheads: £8.16

£2.76 more on one pizza doesn't sound like much. Now put 1,000 orders through the same maths. That's £2,760 a month, or just over £33,000 a year, from orders that cost you the same to cook.

On a marketplace, the customer isn't yours

When someone orders through Uber Eats, Uber Eats keeps the customer data. You can't email them, text them or offer them a reason to come back. As far as your business is concerned, every marketplace order comes from a stranger.

Order directly and you get a name, an email address and an order history. That's what loyalty schemes and win-back campaigns are built on. Without it you're guessing.

Your ranking isn't up to you

Where you appear on Uber Eats depends on review scores, acceptance rates, speed and whether you pay for promotions. A rival spending more on promotion, or a tweak to the ranking algorithm, can push you down the list overnight, and you won't get a warning.

Your own website and app don't have that problem. Nobody can bump you down your own menu.

Building a direct ordering channel with Flipdish

Flipdish covers the pieces a restaurant needs to take orders directly, and they all connect to each other.

You get a branded website with online ordering. It carries your name, your menu and your own checkout, so the customer pays you and the order goes to your kitchen. No marketplace logo in between.

You also get your own mobile app on iOS and Android. Customers tap your icon on their home screen instead of opening a marketplace and scrolling past your competitors. Flipdish branded apps make repeat ordering a one-tap habit, which is hard to do when customers start every order by searching a marketplace.

Every direct order adds to your customer list. Flipdish's loyalty and marketing tools use that list to send automated win-back messages to people who haven't ordered in a while, give lapsed customers a voucher and reward your most frequent buyers. You can't do any of that with Uber Eats orders.

Direct orders land on the same POS screen as counter orders, so nobody retypes anything. The kitchen works from one queue.

Then there's phone ordering. The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers calls, takes the order and takes payment, which gives you a phone channel that's as easy for the customer as a marketplace and carries no per-order commission.

Should you leave Uber Eats completely?

For most restaurants, no. Not yet anyway.

A marketplace brings in customers who are browsing and just happen to find you. You'd struggle to reach them any other way. So the useful question isn't whether to stay on Uber Eats. It's how to turn Uber Eats customers into direct customers.

Getting marketplace customers to order direct

Put a note in every delivery bag. A flyer, a sticker or a stamp that says "Order direct at yourwebsite.com and skip the fees" is the cheapest nudge there is, and everyone who gets a bag sees it.

Offer a discount on the first direct order. Take 10% off a £12 pizza and you've given away £1.20, but you still keep £6.96 against the £5.40 you'd have had from Uber Eats. You're ahead on the very first order, and every order after that keeps the full £8.16.

Make ordering direct better than ordering through the marketplace. Loyalty points, a faster checkout for returning customers and an app with your branding all give people a reason to bother.

Send collection orders to your own channel. Someone who lives round the corner and wants to pick up their food doesn't need a marketplace to find you. Paying commission on that order is just paying for nothing.

Even a small shift adds up. Move 200 of those 1,000 monthly marketplace orders to your own channel and, using the pizza example above, you keep about £552 more each month.

Running Uber Eats and direct orders together

If you keep your Uber Eats listing, you now have two sets of incoming orders, and the last thing you want is twice the work in the kitchen. Flipdish's marketplace order management pulls orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo into the same POS as your direct orders. The tablet-per-marketplace pile on the counter goes away.

It's worth thinking about this early. Fewer screens means fewer missed or mistyped orders, less to teach new staff, and one place to see how much you're taking across every channel.

What about other Uber Eats alternatives?

Most of the options people search for aren't alternatives at all.

Just Eat and Deliveroo are marketplaces with commission structures like Uber Eats. They'll give you reach, but they cost you margin in the same way, so you've swapped one dependency for another.

A basic website built on Squarespace or Wix with a payment plugin can take orders. It won't connect to your POS, it has no loyalty scheme and no app, and somebody has to manage fulfilment by hand. For a restaurant doing real delivery volume that gets tiring fast.

Flipdish is the one that does the whole job: direct ordering, POS integration, loyalty, marketing and marketplace order management in one place. If the aim is to stop depending on a marketplace, that's the option that gets you there.

Where direct ordering goes wrong

Two things trip restaurants up. The first is the flyer with a web address nobody types. A QR code on the bag that opens your menu page is easier than a URL someone has to remember, so put the code on the bag and not just the address.

The second is discounting too hard. A 10% first-order voucher is enough, because direct orders already save you more than 20 percentage points compared with a 25% commission. Give away 30% on a £12 pizza and you keep about £4.63, which is less than the £5.40 you'd get from Uber Eats.

What to expect in the first year

The question every operator asks is whether customers will actually use it.

Some will, but not overnight. A direct channel won't replace your marketplace revenue in the first month. Direct orders start small. They grow when you keep promoting the channel and keep the loyalty scheme active, and the bag flyers and first-order vouchers do most of that work.

Be patient with the early numbers. A restaurant doing 1,000 marketplace orders a month shouldn't expect to move most of them in the first few weeks. The early direct orders will mostly come from regulars who already know you. Those regulars are also the easiest people to convert, since they were ordering from you anyway and were paying Uber Eats for the privilege.

The longer you run it, the better it gets. Every direct order adds someone to your customer list, and a bigger list makes the next campaign cheaper to run because you're no longer paying a marketplace to reach people you've already served.

How to get started

Look at where your orders come from now. What share is Uber Eats, what share is counter and what share is phone? Work out where you keep the most margin.
Set up your direct channel. Flipdish online ordering can be configured and live within weeks.
Sort out how you'll move customers over: flyers in the bag, a first-order voucher and a loyalty sign-up at the first purchase.
Track direct orders as a share of revenue every month, so you can see whether the flyers and vouchers are working.
Keep Uber Eats for finding new customers. The goal is to stop depending on it, not to leave.

Where this leaves you

Uber Eats is a decent way to get discovered. It's a poor way to protect your margin or build a customer base you can call your own.

A direct channel built with Flipdish gives you orders without marketplace commission, a customer list that belongs to you and a loyalty scheme that brings people back, while your Uber Eats listing carries on bringing in new faces.

Talk to Flipdish about setting up your direct ordering channel.